Lily White (35 page)

But Leonard looked grateful for the query, as if he’d been waiting days for someone to ask it. “No servants,” he managed to say. For an instant, he seemed so frail, so old, even, that Lee was afraid he would collapse into Jazz’s arms. But then Leonard glimpsed Sylvia in the bamboo chair, wringing her exquisitely manicured hands. Immediately, he was filled with savage energy.

“Four in goddamn help were supposed to be here,” he growled. “One—the driver, fellow who shops for groceries—was supposed to pick us up at the airport.” He clenched his teeth so tight it seemed the enamel of the uppers and lowers had fused. Finally, he was able to pry them apart. “He never showed. Okay, I’m cool, calm, collected. I call the house.
No one is there!
Okay, I tell myself. It’s the goddamn Caribbean. The phones aren’t working. I get three cabs. No one speaks English for crissake.” Suddenly, realizing “crissake,” like Christmas, had Christ in it, he stopped his diatribe. “Sorry,” he apologized to Jazz. “Anyway, finally I got Robin to look alive and tell the cabdrivers where to go in French, so we got here. And what happens? It’s empty! An empty house! An empty refrigerator! I manage to grab one of the cabs before he takes off. I go to the local gendarmes. They call
the guy who’s the butler. He says he’s off for Christmas! What? I say.
What?
I have a house full of people. Sorry, he says. Monsieur de Valois—that’s the French bastard who owns this place—said they could have the week off.
Paid
them. Two weeks vacation pay.”

“Did you—” Lee began.

“Please!” her father said, angrily, contemptuously. “I offered him twice that. Three times that. I told him: Name your price. He says: Sorry, we wish to be with our families for the holidays. So I called de Valois.”

“And?” Lee asked.

“And he’s off hunting something. Bear. Boar. I couldn’t get what his wife was saying, with her stupid Frog accent and Robin was sleeping and I couldn’t get her up to come to the phone. Won’t be back till ‘le tent of January,’ she says. Sorry, a little misunderstanding. January tenth! When we’ll be back in New York for four goddamn days!”

“I’ll call her tomorrow,” Lee said, waiting for her father to be grateful.

But he was glaring at her mother with an animus beyond hate. “I’m sorry,” Sylvia cried, covering her face with her hands. “I just forgot!”

“Forgot what?” Lee asked.

“Dinner,” Sylvia whispered.

The Whites’ houseguests, Polly and Lloyd Gilliam, sat under a huge canvas umbrella, breathing in the sweet, soft Caribbean air, waves lapping near their feet. They sipped iced tea and looked put out. Actually, that is an understatement, for as Lee was slogging through the sand, bringing out a plate of cookies—which her father and the Gilliams insisted on calling biscuits—she overheard Polly grousing to her husband: “I am so supremely pissed I can’t even discuss it.” From the waist up,
Polly was built the way she wanted to be, thin and breastless like Twiggy. From the waist down, however, she was heavy, bell-bottomed, like an accessory made for a boat, weighted not to tip over in rough weather. Thus shaped, she had wrapped a giant chiffon scarf around the waist of her bathing suit, but a random breeze had uncovered a hefty hip and a huge, dimpled thigh.

“Pissed?” Lloyd said. “Pissed? My dear, I am beyond pissed. I am in utter
extremis.
You, on the other hand, have no right to be pissed since it was
you,
love, who said, and I quote: ‘No, not Mustique. We’ve been invited by Mr. Fur himself’—Mr. Fuh, as he would pronounce it—‘who’s having all
sorts
of marvelous people to St. Bart’s—’”

The Whites, Lee thought, did not think in terms of family honor. Still, at this moment, she wished they did, so she could avenge it. Punch that snotty prick in the snoot he tanned at other people’s second houses. Jerk his well-stroked goatee. Pretentious asshole. At dinner the night before, he pontificated on Whither Henry Kissinger? as if he were James Reston. But it hadn’t taken much cross-examination to reveal that the articles he wrote were celebrity profiles for magazines like
New York
and
Esquire
—“Maria Schneider’s Two-Step: What the
Tango
Star Won’t Say.” Lloyd stopped talking as Lee’s shadow fell over them.

“Ah,” Lloyd said, because he could not remember her name, “the Bringer of Biscuits.” He scrutinized the proffered plate, then shook his head. Not good enough, was the unsaid message. Polly, unable to accept a cookie judged inferior by a cultural arbiter of her husband’s stature, would have had to refuse as well. But before Lee could offer them, a hideous scream—a woman’s shriek merging with a man’s howl—burst forth from the pink villa, shattering a perfect Christmas peace.

“Stop it!” Lee shouted at her parents. “Be quiet, for God’s sake!” It was not that she wanted decorum. It was that someone needed
to think, and since her parents were standing in Robin and Ira’s room, watching their younger daughter convulsing on the bed—naked, sweating, pale legs jerking, mouth foaming, eyes rolling back—and wailing at the horror of such a sight, Lee was going to be the one who had to think. Oh God, why hadn’t she taken the MCATs instead of the LSATs? She could have gone to medical school; she’d know what to do now. When the shit really hit the fan, who the hell needed a lawyer?

Convulsion: Fever? She put her hands on Robin’s forehead and neck. Drenched, but cool to the touch. “What is it?” Leonard cried out. Sylvia made terrible squeaking sounds, as if she were pretending to be a mouse: “Eeee. Eeee,” over and over again. Could Robin be having some sort of allergic reaction? Lee turned to Ira. He was standing in a corner between the bed and the window, trying to fit his back into the right angle where the walls met. In black briefs: the bad boy, head hung. His arms and legs were as scrawny as a child’s. Only the few hairs growing around his small, pale nipples showed he had passed puberty. “What did she have to eat today?” Lee snapped at him. “Ira!”

It took him what seemed forever to lift his head and say: “I don’t know.” But then Lee understood. Her sister was now on heroin. Too much? Too little? Oh, God, where was Jazz? Driving all over the damn island, looking for tonic for Polly’s vodka. What? Polly had whined. No Schweppes? Don’t they have Schweppes on St. Bart’s? Isn’t this civilization? I’ll go on a search and destroy mission for tonic, Jazz told Polly, charming her. She’d actually smiled, and Leonard had been so grateful he’d walked Jazz to the rented jeep, saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you, practically sobbing with relief and gratitude. But now Jazz had been gone for over an hour. All right: Think. Okay, Robin was having either d.t.’s or convulsions, and that would suggest withdrawal. Didn’t it? Jesus, what the hell did Lee know about heroin? She—all her friends—had ingested a pharmacopoeia of drugs,
but not heroin. Who the hell would be so stupid as to take heroin? Robin.

“Out!” she barked at her parents. Paralyzed, they stood by the bed, her mother still making mouse sounds, but softer now. “Get out!” she said even louder, and to her amazement, they about-faced and double-timed out. A little too eagerly. Lee realized that now, if anything happened—if Robin died—she would be blamed. It was too silent. Then she heard the rumble of the jeep and then Jazz’s voice: “Hey, I found this little store with gallons of tonic!”

“In here!” she called. “In Robin’s room.”

Ira shuffled his feet, probably meaning to move out as well, but he was too stoned to actually ambulate. “What the hell is going on with her?” Lee yelled at him. In slow motion, Ira raised his narrow shoulders into a shrug. She raced around the bed and stood right before him. He smelled musty, like a dank basement. “I know it’s heroin. Is it an overdose or is it withdrawal?” Ira managed to hoist his head so he could look directly at Lee, but all he did was look; he had nothing to say. “Overdose or withdrawal?” she bellowed. Still nothing. She grabbed his throat in her hand and squeezed. His Adam’s apple bobbed about in terror. He clutched her wrist and tried to pull it away, but he lacked the strength or the coordination. “Tell me, you son-of-a-bitch, or I’ll squeeze tighter. I’ll choke you to death and bury you in the sand, and no one except the fucking crabs will know about it. Overdose or withdrawal?”

Ira managed to get out a tiny sound: “Withdrawal.”

“Why? Did she want to stop?” When he didn’t respond, Lee slammed him against the wall. “Did she want to stop or did you just take too much?”

“Me,” he said.

“How do the two of you take it? Intravenously?”

“Yeah.” It was less a word than an exhalation.

“Do you have any more? Answer me.”

“Not much.”

Jazz came into the room, bouncing in his sneakers. Then he saw Robin and froze. “What …?”

“Heroin,” Lee said. She waited, expecting Jazz to do something, but he just stood there, hands at his sides, staring at Robin’s naked, sweat-drenched body. Lee separated the sheet from the blanket that lay twisted on the floor and covered her sister.

“Listen to me,” Lee said to Ira. “You’re going to get the heroin right now and show me everything: the stuff itself, the needles, all the shit you use. So I’ll know exactly what you have. Then you’re going to put the smallest possible amount in the needle and give it to her so she comes out of this convulsion.”

“Okay.”

She looked over to Jazz, but he was looking down at the floor. “You’re going to give it all to me,” she told Ira. “I’ll be first-vice-president in charge of heroin. If we can avoid going to a hospital here I’d like to, because I don’t know if they’re any good with drug problems. And I don’t know anything about the island’s drug laws. I don’t want my sister winding up with a life sentence on St. Bart’s. So if you can get her stabilized, we’re going to hire a plane and get her to a hospital back in the States and get her detoxified properly.” She took a deep breath. “If she needs another shot, you’ll give it to her. How often does she”—Lee squeezed Ira’s throat until his tongue bulged out—“shoot up?”

“Four, five times.”

“A day?” He nodded. “Right before we land, we’ll have to get rid of the drugs. We can’t risk bringing them in. You’re going to stay with us until she gets wheeled into the emergency room. Then you get a hundred bucks. You get your clothes. You get out of her life permanently. If you don’t, I will personally take a knife and slit your throat. Do you understand me, Ira?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I mean what I say?”

Ira hesitated, but at last, wiping his nose on the back of his hand, he said: “Yeah.”

“Then let’s move it.” She moved in front of Jazz, staying with Ira as he knelt down and pulled a leather shaving kit from under the bed. She watched as he prepared the drug and filled a syringe. His fingers seemed flaccid, and she winced as he fumbled with the drug paraphernalia. “Ira, if you give her too much, you’re dead too. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

He took a length of rubber tubing, the sort that would be used in a hospital, and made a tourniquet around Robin’s thin arm. Then, with a casualness more appropriate to handing someone a cup of coffee, he ran his finger over her skin until he found an accessible vein and injected her. Within seconds, the convulsion stopped. Robin’s lashes fluttered as if she were a belle flirting with a new beau. She began to smile at Ira, but then she spotted her sister. “Hey,” Robin said, the smile vanishing. She dabbed away at the dried white foam on her chin. “You don’t belong in here. Out. I mean it, Lee. Haul ass!” Then she closed her eyes again.

It was only after Lee sent Jazz out to have her father hire a plane—now!—to fly to Miami that she came up on the side of the bed and smacked her sister across the face.

M
y secretary, Sandi Zimmerman, was born with a happy face. Add to her button nose, round brown eyes, and congenitally upturned mouth a ponytail that curled up at the end into a cheery little smile-shape, and you had a person strangers wanted to meet.

People who knew her, however, avoided her whenever they could. It wasn’t that Sandi was obnoxious or even mean; it was that beyond her two good qualities, honesty and diligence, she had no redeeming social value. Give her a friendly “Hi” and she’d act perplexed.
“Hi?”
she seemed to be wondering; how peculiar; how alienating. Finally, after a too long pause, Sandi would respond with an edgy “Oh. Uh … hi.” Invite her to join you for a cup of coffee, inquire if she’d watched the Oscars the night before, ask her what her vacation plans were—in short, treat her as you would any casual acquaintance—and Sandi
would stiffen, jerking back her head as if you had suggested she join you and a quadruped in a bizarre sexual practice.

Then there was her nerves. From font changes on the office’s word-processing program to the introduction of the four-digit suffix for zip codes—everything rattled her: There was nothing about which Sandi was not anxious. Every client walking into the office was a maniac about to pull out a machete and cut us down—or, if not slaughter us, at least set us up by means of a subtle and nefarious ruse so we’d be easy pickings for a malpractice suit. Although she had been working for me for fifteen years, I had no idea how she’d come to be so strange since questions about her family or her childhood made her even more apprehensive. All I really knew about Sandi was that she was my age, lived with a divorced sister and a bachelor brother in Huntington, was a terrific stenographer and typist, and had a fondness bordering on fixation for Celestial Seasonings Lemon Zinger tea.

Naturally, in the back of my mind, I sensed that a decade or two on the couch probably wouldn’t hurt her. But in an office relationship, it’s easier to assume the weird person you are dealing with is eccentric rather than a fellow human being in terrible pain. But Sandi kept getting stranger and stranger.

Being a forty-five myself, and a feminist, I was reluctant to blame her increasing oddness on menopause. But I overcame my reluctance. About three months before Norman became a client, she had started going nuts about dirty telephones: The only phone in the office she would use was the one at her desk; arriving in the morning or coming back from the ladies’ room or lunch, she would spray the entire receiver—mouthpiece, handpiece, earpiece—with Lysol. A couple of weeks after that, she began to spend her lunch hour in the conference room, where, after glugging down one can of vanilla Ensure and one can of Diet Slice, she cut out elaborate doilies from old copies of the
Law Journal.
I was tempted to ask her what the doilies were for, but I was afraid my question might set her off on a psychotic voyage from which she’d never return and I would then become one of those lawyers who get ten years taken off their life by having to deal with temp agencies.